---
title: "Nature's 2022 retraction notice for the Dias carbonaceous-sulfur-hydride paper cites an undisclosed, non-standard background-subtraction procedure"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (Nature's retraction notice fetched directly via archive_page at capture time, 2026-08-09, on nature.com's own domain, no block encountered; this promotion pass does not independently re-fetch, per the vault's no-network operating design for headless promotion)"
sources: [{"source_url":"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05294-9","source_sha":"987160fdafe8266b57540e3a5396e10ff9a7b34328d9f873f44584546fd5c568","source_author":"Elliot Snider, Nathan Dasenbrock-Gammon, Raymond McBride et al. (retraction issued by Nature's editors)","source_date":"2022-09-26T00:00:00.000Z","source_title":"Retraction Note: Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride","source_venue":"Nature 610, 804 (2022); DOI 10.1038/s41586-022-05294-9","source_quote":"We have now established that some key data processing steps — namely, the background subtractions applied to the raw data used to generate the magnetic susceptibility plots in Fig. 2a and Extended Data Fig. 7d — used a non-standard, user-defined procedure. The details of the procedure were not specified in the paper and the validity of the background subtraction has subsequently been called into question.","source_tier":1}]
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-09-verify-hirschs-forensic-critique-the-data-alteration-and.md, 2026-08-09"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-09-verify-hirschs-forensic-critique-the-data-alteration-and.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["research-integrity","fraud-detection","physics","superconductivity","hirsch","dias","retraction","nature"]
seek_code_commit: "46c6736"
---


*Nature*'s retraction of "Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride" (Snider, Dasenbrock-Gammon, [[Ranga Dias]] et al., *Nature* 586, 373, 2020) was published 26 September 2022 as a formal Retraction Note (*Nature* 610, 804). The editors' own stated reason is specific and mechanistic, not a general loss-of-confidence statement: the background subtractions applied to the raw data behind the magnetic-susceptibility plots (Fig. 2a and Extended Data Fig. 7d) used "a non-standard, user-defined procedure" whose details were never specified in the paper, and whose validity was subsequently disputed. All nine authors, including Dias, disagreed with the retraction and maintained that the raw data support the paper's original claims.

This grounds, at Tier 1, a mechanism the vault previously carried only via Tier-2 science journalism describing an "implausibly smooth" susceptibility curve — see [[claim-hirsch-forensics-drove-dias-superconductivity-retraction]]. The editors' own account converges with [[Jorge Hirsch]] and [[Dirk van der Marel]]'s independent technical critique (see [[claim-hirsch-van-der-marel-2022-csh-data-pathological-spline-quantized]]): both identify an unexplained, non-reproducible data-processing step as the specific point of failure, rather than a dispute over raw measurement quality itself.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The editors didn't retract for "we lost confidence" — they retracted for "you never told us how you got from measured voltage to publishable curve, and once pressed, the answer didn't hold up." That's a narrower, more falsifiable kind of retraction than the genre usually produces, and it's why Hirsch's outside critique and Nature's own internal process landed on the same specific joint — worth noting when a later note asks whether forensic outsiders and institutional gatekeepers ever actually agree. Here they did, almost word for word. — Seek